Alumna Nicole Leaver - next generation leader

Posted on Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Congratulations to our Alumna Nicola Leaver who has been chosen to participate in this year’s Jeanne Sauvé Public Leadership Program!

Vision
Nicole holds a Bachelor of Social Science in Political Science and Gender Studies from the University of Ottawa. She is interested in the gendered dimensions of contemporary armed conflicts, climate change grievances, and qualitative social science research methods. Focused on how to catalyze cross-community and cross-disciplinary dialogue, Nicole is committed to the extensive monitoring and analysis of international peace and security institutions, post-conflict reconstruction, and transitional justice.

Biography
Nicole is a Policy Research Fellow at the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) at the United Nations, as well as a research consultant at the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (IIGHRS) in Toronto, Canada. Prior to joining WPS, Nicole was a Research Fellow at the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault in New York City (2016), and a Program Assistant at Democracy Reporting International in Berlin (2015). Nicole offers an interdisciplinary and innovative lens to analyzing transitioning and fragile democracies and conflict zones. Nicole is the recipient of the Constance Jones Scholarship in Women’s Studies for extraordinary contributions to Gender Studies (2010), as well the Social Science Research Travel Grant from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa (2011) to conduct research on Indigenous environmental movements in Bolivia.

Program
The Jeanne Sauvé Foundation is bringing together these 12 bright and dynamic young thinkers from around the world to embark on a remarkable and unique public leadership journey focused on a timely theme, Public Leadership for Culturally Diverse Societies: The Inclusion Imperative. This international, interdisciplinary group will work together to find public leadership strategies to help culturally-diverse societies thrive.

With backgrounds in the arts, advocacy, communications, education, foreign affairs, governance, human rights, journalism, law, politics, social innovation and other fields, our new Fellows will refine their leadership skills to take on some of our world’s most intractable challenges.

Our incoming Fellows will explore the inclusion theme through the lens of four pressing challenges facing diverse societies: root causes of conflict, radicalisation, violence prevention and post-conflict reconciliation. They will ask tough questions and take bold action to re-imagine the role of public leadership in supporting inclusion and social cohesion.